WEEK 9b THE NULLABOR - ESPERANCE

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Having left Guy behind in Streaky Bay, I hit the road and turned on my ipod. 1,900 km to Perth and 6 days to travel. Of course I was not planning to take the most direct route, and to head off-road a bit to see some good National Parks along the way.  After 2 days of driving across the Nullabor (the tree less plain) I stopped at a roadhouse for the night as it was Friday night and thought I would go to the pub and an interesting chat having not spoken to anyone and was going crazy just listening to my ipod all day in the car. I ended up meeting two backpackers (Dutch and English) whose car had broken down at the previous roadhouse. They had to leave it behind only to the roadhouse owners delight. I am sure that he would fix it and use it again much to the distress of the super tight dutch backpacker who had planned to live in the car for the coming few months. Ha ha ha I thought, they had been too tight to get it checked out at a garage even though it had smelt pretty bad of oil for the last few weeks and somehow the gearbox had blown. Hardly a surprise. 

I decided to give them a lift, as far as Esperance in Western Australia but after 2 hours I realized that the English guy was really nice and the Dutch guy was a tight arsed stingy backpacker who had not got the whole point of traveling. As I had come from the oyster capital of Australia, I thought I would share some of my world class oysters with them. The english guy tried one and made a big fuzz and face of how discussing it was. However, good on him for trying. The Dutch guy refused to even try it.... sometimes I wonder why people travel if they are not open for new experiences, at least give it a go. 

We drove on pretty rough dirt tracks all day and camped out at a salt-lake in the Cape Arid National Park as we could not get to the official campsite before it got dark. Luckily I followed my intuition and stopped as it was getting dark - it’s part of my safety policy to not travel after sunset. The next morning only 2 km from where we had set up camp some German backpackers in a Nissan Patrol 4x4 had got stuck in the mud. Salt lake mud is particularly tricky to get out of and they had absolutely no recovery gear with them..... not much food and water. Basically, not prepared for these remote locations and should not be there.  We where about 250km from the nearest bitumen road, services towing etc. I assisted them with my tow rope and skills. Two Aussie fishermen came to their rescue as well. Following this episode, the fishermen realised that I was on my way to go fishing at this amazing beach and invited me to tag along with them. It was brilliant! We camped with them at night and I went night fishing with them and caught seven 4kg salmons in 2 hours. It was pretty damn good fishing! We even think that we had shark on the hook... let’s just say the fish where biting.